Ruby Reflections

pianobar +1: Pandora CLI

If you’re like me, you jam to pandora while writing code. Currently my favorite station is “Indie Electronic Radio.” Are you also a home row hero? @Nathan, I’m lookin at you. :)

As a web developer I make heavy use of the browser, often multiple browsers. My current go-to is Chrome, but I’ll often run admin tools in Safari and / or run tests in Firefox.

One problem with my workflow is that I…

tl;dr: We watched No TV for January 2016 and got more sleep, read books, went on dates, worked on puzzles and are pretty stoked with the results. My wife, Nicole, suggested some time in late December that we try not to watch any TV in January. Since our boys were born, we’ve both really enjoyed the time between when they fall asleep and when we head to bed. It’s our quiet time. We typically watch…

So you wanna work remote, huh?

Increasingly, companies are either fully remote or are at least considering remote workers. There are really two approaches to becoming a remote employee. In “The Four Hour Work Week“, Tim Farriss talks about how to transition to remote work in your current job. This will focus on getting a job, and some specifics about remote jobs. This is post is not about transitioning from onsite to offsite…

I’ve observed an interesting trend in some new companies over the past few years. Companies like IFTTT (consolidates small pieces of functionality exposed via tons of different apis), Buffer (aggregates the creation functions available on social media apis), Coverhound (aggregates searchable insurance platforms), Zapier etc. All integrate tons of third party APIs to provide a consolidated…

Generate Sitemaps for Rails apps running on Heroku by publishing to AWS S3

tl;dr Generate the sitemap files, push them to AWS and set up a route that redirects to those files from Rails.

While exploring google web master tools and inspecting some aspects of Insider AISEO, I recognized a missing piece of the puzzle: sitemap! There are a few options out there for generating sitemaps for Rails, most of which generate a set of XML files and drop them in your public…

If you’ve built a Rails + Backbone app you know that a common way to use templates is by writing files with the .jst.ejs file extension. Additionally, you may take for granted the fact that these templates are precompiled _.template style for you. As you know they are made available in the JST namespace via properties with the same name as the file (including directory).

Recently I received these…

Push Database to Heroku

One question I’m often asked is how to get started quickly in production with the data populated during development. Putting aside the fact that this is generally a bad idea. I’d like to discuss a few options and show you how I moved my 118GB postgres database to heroku.

One really great option, if you’ve got a reasonable amount of data, is to use the seed_dump gem. Filling out Seed files is…

It’s New Years resolution time again! It’s healthy to constantly be setting and achieving goals. IMO goals are best set when you need something to strive towards, not necessarily Jan 1st. The new year does provide a nice explicit opportunity for everyone to review and refine their goals. Here are a few of mine:

Earn 1000 points on stackoverflow.

Type 100 WPM in 3 races on typeracer.

✓ Publish 12…

I’ve been super interested in productivity hacking lately. Part of my “look something up” workflow looks like this:

search google for something

open the first N promising looking links in new tabs

click on the tab who’s favicon finishes spinning first

scan, and if dead end CMD+W

I’ve found that the quicker I can see that a page is a dead end the better. It isn’t all that much work to click on…

Rails edge case solved with middleware

Recently I was working with a friend, @sidho on an interesting problem. Sid built this awesome app for tracking beers. It’s a Rails app that pulls some stuff from a brewery API. He setup a webhook and was receiving updates from the API. Problem was: the data posted to the webhook included the key “action”which was used to denote what type of change was happening. By default, when a request is…

Solving Presence in Rails: Pusher vs. Node Service

There you are, sipping a mocha, writing another Rails app. It has users, and you’d love it if those users could interact and have some deep meaningful realtime connection. What do you reach for? Pusher? Generally that’s my first go to for realtime stuff! Pusher is awesome. It’s a software as a service platform for adding realtime awesomeness to your app. As you would expect there are libraries in…

Feature envy of race vs track vs word checker

One of my goals for 2015 is to up my typing speed. I’ve never been that great a typer and I’m currently averaging about 75 WPM and shooting for 100 WPM by the end of the year. As part of my goal I’ve been practicing with some really great web based type tutors, games and tools. If you’re interested in playing some online typing games for free, you should definitely checkout typeracer and ztype.

I…

Live demo ionic app

We’ve all been to sites that explain features of an app and entice you to visit the market place and download. If you’ve developed an app and are starting to build out a landing page, you might have googled “app landing page” and found some themes from themeforest.net. These are flashy designs that display the features of the app and expect the creator to drop in app screenshots that my slide…

Every place I’ve ever lived has had a different pace. I spent my childhood in a small mountain town in Tahoe called Kings Beach. KB has a super chill, very laid back pace. Everyone is either a tourist or in love with the mountains and lake. I would say, the area provides a nice lifestyle, especially for those interested in the out doors and relaxing.

Just before starting high school we moved to…

Model layer in Angular.js

Many of the so called MV* frameworks have some explicit support for a model layer. When working in backbone.js, the model layer is very clearly defined in Backbone.Model and Backbone.Collection.

Instances of Backbone.Model and Backbone.Collection interact with a rest api using $.ajax. In the world of backbone there is a lot of buy in to the evented architecture. When a model or collection…

Writing ES6 with Ionic

For some context: When working on front end stuff, I’ve always written pure javascript with the exception of a few one off coffee script fixes. I’m super stoked about ES6 and have been converting many of my js heavy projects to use some of the ES6 syntax. Most recently I’ve been working on an app called Pushbit for competing with friends for weekly pushup count. It’s written using the ionic…